The Universe Frowns on Houston

…because something this horrific demands an astronomical sense of outrage.

The sad news comes from BadRap via our friends over at YesBiscuit.

I am deeply saddened and disappointed to learn that all 187 dogs saved from the Houston dogfighting ring have been killed by their “rescuers”. BAD RAP tells it like it is:

They did it. They went for the easy out: The most convenient, economical way to deal with an unwanted excess of abuse victims.

Thank goodness they don’t “help” battered women, I guess.

‘Biscuit’s analogy to battered women brings up a disturbing and interesting point. Something is really wrong with a society where pathetic bastards men convicted of beating their wives get treated with more loving kindness fairness than dogs whose only crime is belonging to the wrong person — and the wrong breed.

What am I talking about? Restraining orders. Those esoteric bits of paper armor intended to protect women from their abusers - that have now fallen victim to a labyrinthine system where procedures differ from stationhouse to courthouse and where, sadly, violators often benefit more than the violated.

I’m not going to argue that dogs should be granted personhood, however… when a man who brutally beats his wife isn’t just given a free legal aid attorney and habeas corpus protection from arbitrary imprisonment but is also - all too often- given little more than a wink and a nudge when he violates a TRO; and a dog who belongs to a law-breaking, abusive bastard (or worse yet, to an innocent person) is seized and killed with less thought than we give a Thanksgiving turkey (and this, in the name of “rescue”) — we really need to re-examine our cultural mores.

[apologies for the rambling, disjointed structure of that last paragraph... The Cold From Hell has my brain stuck somwhere between park and neutral and I fear that I didn't coast smoothly to the conclusions I was trying to make]